When I was a twerp, I used to save and reload all the time, especially when I wanted things to go just a certain way. However playing it now I only save on level start, and redo the level from the start if I die. While I find this to be fair, it can be annoying on levels that have really grindy parts to it.

I'm actually moving away from saves even in other games. Punishing deaths makes victory all the sweeter. A checkpoint every ten minutes or so is good enough.

I'm not above saving after getting stomped multiple times in a row at the exact same place, but sometimes the challenge to get through an area the right way is motivating. It's particularly exhilirating to finally beat something that used to be a no go even with quicksave spam.

Occasionally, I stop playing the first time I get killed. Not trivializing death helps reinforce immersion and makes the experience more intense and enjoyable, to me. Assuming the game we're talking about has decent gameplay and balance, anyway.

Gez said:No blanket answer. It depends on level length, difficulty, and on how seriously I'm taking the playthrough.

That's my opinion too.

However, it is nice to see people talking about voluntarily setting a "no save" limit for themselves rather than complaining that the game needs to disallow saving to make the game harder (like I've seen in other communities). I never understood why such people couldn't just, you know, not save.

In entertainment, restraining yourself from using particular features is something that is fairly unique to video games. Playing football, you wouldn't purposefully mess up a penalty if you were allowed one. Playing canasta, you wouldn't discard your jokers based on the card being too good. Most games tend to have hard rules designed around providing the best possible experience, no matter how many tools you use - in fact, many games tend to be designed first and foremost around optimal use of the available tools.

Some video games offer more leeway out of the box. Unlimited saving can be particulary pervasive because intuitively it feels like you're making progress, going from the start of the game to the end point. So it's tempting to use saves, which is fine; and it can become tempting to abuse saves, which can become tricky, because sometimes it happens to the point where you don't master necessary skills and fumble your way thanks to endless attempts or cheap tactics that ultimately aren't very fun or rewarding to use, a problem that only gets worse as the game difficulty increases over time (which tends to be the norm).

Even for someone who understands all that and would be inclined, intellectually, to exercise some caution, saving just enough to prevent frustrating moments but not so much to ruin the experience, lack of willpower is a potential issue. Most of us tend to make bad choices on a daily basis based on instant gratification - we drink too much, we smoke too much, we eat junk food, we stay up late at night despite knowing we have an early business meeting tomorrow. Video games are no exception.

While there is always the option to make a game harder for yourself with some self-control, disabling manual saving can sometimes allow for a more social experience. Would games like I Wanna Be The Guy or Dark Souls be as popular and reputed as relentlessly hard if you could quicksave your way through? Having an identical ruleset for everyone, a set of rules that enforce a certain level of difficulty, leads to more competitiveness.

This isn't to say unlimited saving is bad. I think both design choices are equally as valid and fitting for different games and different players, with neither being an objectively superior approach for everything and everyone.

Phml said:In entertainment, restraining yourself from using particular features is something that is fairly unique to video games. Playing football, you wouldn't purposefully mess up a penalty if you were allowed one. Playing canasta, you wouldn't discard your jokers based on the card being too good.

Some games do. For example, in French Tarot, you can decide to challenge yourself with more difficult victory conditions, such as declaring a slam, bidding "guard against", announcing "one at the end", etc. In Go, you can decide to use handicaps that favor your opponent. Playing Klondike with three-card draws instead of one card at a time.

That said, a big difference is that saves in video games are for single-player mode. You don't save in deathmatch, and you typically only save in coop when quitting the game with the intent to resume it later.

I save more than i load as i'm a tad over cautious, it's become a habit.

Realistically i only ever need to save twice each level, once at the beginning and another midway. The idea of starting a level from scratch when you've died more than 3/4 through the map would frustrate me to no end. Having to restart a level over one small error is too tedious in my books.

These days i save around 5 times on average, and then i'd save before i quit. I'd never attempt to play 32 levels (or around) without saves, i just don't have the time or patience to accomplish that.

Some games do. For example, in French Tarot, you can decide to challenge yourself with more difficult victory conditions, such as declaring a slam, bidding "guard against", announcing "one at the end", etc. In Go, you can decide to use handicaps that favor your opponent. Playing Klondike with three-card draws instead of one card at a time.

I guess it's a matter of perspective, and I can see how not saving in video games and using handicaps in normal games could be seen as the same thing, but from my perspective, to compare both things as the same you have to assume saving is the intended way to play; and while it is probably a reasonable assumption to make for many games, without any hard limit set on how much you can save there is essentially no ceiling, and I believe it's just as reasonable to assume while some amount of saving might be intended, quicksaving as much as possible isn't the way most games are balanced around - simply because I can hardly recall any game that manages to provide a meaningful challenge under those conditions. The ability to save your progress every few seconds removes most twitch-based difficulty, unsuccessful outcomes can only result from resource depletion (i.e. saving in front of a cyberdemon shooting a rocket at you while you have 10% HP) and can be negated by reverting to a previous save.

To put it another way, my entire point is that in video games with unlimited saving you often have to not quicksave as efficiently as possible in order to have a balanced and entertaining experience; whereas while you can certainly add handicaps to any game, generally speaking the baseline works as is - or the modified rules end up becoming the baseline.

I liked how this was handled in Max Payne in highest difficulty - you get 3 quicksaves per mission ("map") and if you waste them too early, you'd either have to restart it whole and choose where to save more wisely or face the rest of "map" in one go.

Very rarely do I save mid-level; unless it's some stupidly huge map which does nothing but eat up my time (in which case I'll save every 10 minutes or after a huge fight), I'll save once at the very start of the map and then just go through what I can in one hit.

Something about saving after every corner grates on me, it seems to make playing the game completely pointless; where's the fun in taking no risks whatsoever? I've seen YT videos of people doing this during the standard Hell on Earth campaign, as early as MAP02!!

i usually save after intense fights (So I don't have to go trhough it again) or if I'm interrupted and have to leave the computer, and even then only on certain maps. Otherwise I usually on't save until I die once. Once I die I start to save at different points in a level.

No, it just means I don't save my game at all (in Unix, /dev/null is a device file you can send anything you want to discard or ignore completely).

Never saving works for me because I mostly play vanilla maps, and those run into engine limits before the map gets so huge that not saving becomes impractical. I also don't often play super-hard stuff like Hell Revealed & Co. If a map is too frustrating, I'll just turn down the difficulty a notch or two. If I still can't finish, then I give up (at least for the time being).

I'll save in megawads if I intend to play the thing in its entirety from start to finish, and usually only save at the start of maps or just before picking up a skullkey. I've always found saving in single-level pwads to be a little silly unless it was a map that is notoriously long.

I save mostly after 'close calls'. Like if I just killed a huge army and nearly died, it's a good time to save for me after that (so I don't have to do it all again, I'm really impatient and lazy lol).
But before exiting the game and going off to do something else, I always make sure to finish the map so next time I play it's at the next map, not in the middle of one.

I either only save at the beginning of levels, or upon collecting kays -- the latter of which is only on tougher levels, so they are the most likely to be reloaded.

This habit isn't so bad -- my last playthrough of Plutonia saw me only save at the beginning of levels for about 3/4 the game; though it does depend. For example, I only saved at the beginning of MAP31, but MAP32 was a per-key job.

I always save at the start of a map and never anywhere else, unless I'm testing something or the the map is way above my skill level.

If you've never played without saving I definitely think you should try it. It's quite an epic experience, particularly on long difficult maps.

Nothing beats those moments where you're deep into a level, you have low health, ammo, etc., you know nearly all hope is lost, you know that all the time and effort you spent to get where are has been wasted...